


When I'm around you, I...

by neurodramaticfool



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ballet, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-27
Updated: 2017-01-27
Packaged: 2018-09-20 08:21:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9482618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neurodramaticfool/pseuds/neurodramaticfool
Summary: Inspired by a Tumblr post that was like "E and R meet in ballet class as children, and when they're adults, even if E has quit years before, they still enjoy dancing together around the city".I tried.





	

Nobody ever forgets the way it feels to set foot for the first time in a dance studio.

There is a great fascination to those shining mirrors that cover entire walls, and to the seemingly endless bars at the center of the room, and to the pianos in the corners, especially when you're incredibly young, and everything seems so big.

Grantaire had fought - as much as a six year-old can fight, that is - to obtain the permission to attend a ballet class, and he was so happy, so full of wonder, when he finally stepped inside the studio that he barely noticed the teacher, young and graceful, sitting alongside the pianist in the corner. 

Then she stepped up, introduced herself as Miss Fantine, and started the lesson. 

It was easy, of course, but it was incredibly hard. Positions. With feet, with arms. Oh, and the head. 

_ Première, deuxième, troisième _ . “Please, sweetie, a bit larger, here".  _ Quatrième. Quinzième.  _ “You will kill your knees in that way, rotate from your hip not from your feet".

“Longer, longer! Your arms must look like they never end… fingers! Fingers, alive but not rigid!”.

“What you looking at, biscuit? No shoelace is as interesting as the magnificent public you will have, look up!”

 

Grantaire loved her. She was always kind to them, even when she told them they were making mistakes. 

Grantaire loved ballet. At home, he did nothing but revising what he had learnt in class. It felt only natural. (His dad even stopped caring about it being “a women's hobby”. He stopped caring about him and his mother, full stop).

 

After the first two months of lesson, they were getting quite the grasp of the various  _ port-des-bras _ , a newcomer appeared.

Blonde. Angelic. Angry.

And magnetic, adorable, a bit chubby, curly haired, and incredibly unable to put his feet where they should go.

“Let us all welcome our new friend! Now, first position”.

And he couldn't bring his heels together. 

“Sweetie, like  _ this _ ,” Fantine would say. 

And still, he’d fail. It went on for about ten minutes, an eternity, until Grantaire stepped out of his position at the end of a bar made of girls. No one noticed him, in his white collants and pinkish demi-pointes. He walked until he was behind the blonde boy, bent down, pushed his heels together, held him up so he wouldn't fall, pushed also his tights together, rotated in the right way, and went back to his place.

“Shoulders down, if you please, sweethearts,” was the only thing Fantine commented, but she was suppressing a laughter. 

 

So, yes, that was how they met. Unusual, I’ll concede, but not as weird as it might sound: the dance world is far beyond the borders of our usual reality. 

Of course it doesn't end there. The blonde boy felt necessary to point out to Grantaire that he would have made it on his own, to which Grantaire grinned, which made the blonde angry, which made Grantaire laugh, which-

The next time, the blonde asked Grantaire his name. “I don’t like my name, I prefer my surname".

“Which is?”

“Grantaire".

“Right, then I’m Enjolras". 

 

It was incredibly adult, and it was extremely unsettling, seeing two kids, six years of age each, calling each other by surname. No one questioned it. 

There were just two other boys in that huge ballet class of theirs, who soon adhered to their surname rule. Courfeyrac, was one. Prouvaire, the other.

 

The first year went by quickly, even too much. Fantine stopped sitting beside the pianist, then she stopped wearing tight clothes, then she stopped bringing her pointe shoes, then they saw her crying in the bathroom. Another teacher, a younger girl, was staring at her, worried.

 

The new teacher was good, not as good as Fantine, though. Her name was Louison and she was in love with the Vaganova technique. 

Grantaire kept getting better, lesson after lesson, and so his three friends. The thing they loved most about the classes, aside from the dancing, was the time they got to spend in the changing room, where they could talk and talk and talk, until some mother would come and yell at them not being ready yet. 

 

The first time they argued was when they were ten. Of course, they had argued before, but this felt different. They were setting up an end-of-the-year show, a sort of adaptation of Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, where the children would have had to dance the knights and dames. 

But, in addition to that, someone, someone who doesn't know children, had proposed to make a small flashback of the protagonists’ childhood, using children.

Louison was desperate. After half an hour of screaming, she imposed herself. 

“Stop it, you devils! Enjolras, you  _ won't _ be Romeo”. 

Grantaire grinned: he was the best, why would he not play Romeo?

“And neither will you, Grantaire. Your behaviour is shameful!”.

The world fell on his shoulders. He had worked hard for four years, and he deserved this, he deserved- 

“Courfeyrac, you’ll be Romeo, Prouvaire, I want you as Tybalt, Enjolras and Grantaire you get to choose between Mercutio and Benvolio, choose peacefully, or you won't dance at all".

Appalling. Revolting. Disgusting Louison.

 

“That was blackmailing,” Enj muttered later, while changing. He had become skinnier, with lean legs and long, graceful arms. He almost looked like a ballerina. Grantaire tried to stop looking at the way his bones popped out just under his neck. “Why does she have to choose for us, it is unfair!”.

“But it isn't, because you two couldn't stop yelling about who was the best dancer and should play Romeo,” Courf cut in, his big eyes mocking them. 

Grantaire just kept silent, he hated all this. 

 

The choreographer must have been crazy, he was this elder teacher, an old gray man, who had decided that, “For God’s sake, it is 2001, let’s be a little less bigot, here", so he had called both couples of Benvolios and Mercutios and told them, straight away, that, to him, they were lovers, so he would choreograph them that way. 

Grantaire and Enjolras shared a panicked look, the two other boys, some years older, jokingly embraced, faking a passionate kiss. 

The choreography for the older guys was quite explicit, actually, but they were just ten, what would they know. 

Grantaire, though, as soon as he saw a sequence of steps, knew that he would remember that for life. One of the older boys, who was not blonde enough to look like an older Enjolras, would just conclude a couple of grand-jetés en tournant to just fall at the feet of his brunette partner, who would lean on him with apparently all of his weight, while really he was just using him for balance in a very large and very beautiful arabesque. The following steps were quite hard to follow: they included a lot of touching, some fouettés, a couple of pirouettes and a lift. 

The fouettés were what stuck to Grantaire’s memory most: the two boys who danced before his eyes just made each other spin and turn like it was the most natural thing in the world. They were good. They almost looked like all the traditional couples in the other ballets. 

 

The choreographer observed Enjolras and Grantaire for a while, staring at them for a long time. 

“I don’t know what to do with you two,” he stated, “how do two ten year-olds fall in love?”. 

They shared a perplexed glance. 

“Do you guys like each other?” the choreographer asked, evidently not having had anything to do with children ever in his life. 

“No!” they answered, in the unison. It was a lie, of course. They liked each other. A lot. But, being ten, being children, how did they show that they liked each other? Arguing. All. The. Time.

The choreographer lifted an eyebrow. “Oh. Okay. Fine. Then you will just  _ not like _ each other on stage, okay? But with dance steps. Follow me?”.

They followed him, his steps were not too hard, but they were challenging. They had no lifts together, just some balances and some interesting sequences. When Grantaire got older, he often got back in his thoughts to those sequences, and smiled at the subtlety of that old choreographer. He made them push each other, as if they were fighting, but the pushes ended up in pirouettes, though a bit approximated. 

 

When Courfeyrac and Prouvaire sneaked up to watch the two couples, older and younger, rehearse, they couldn’t stop laughing. To them, everything was evident, but all Grantaire and Enjolras were worried about was that they couldn’t execute the steps right. 

“If you don’t close that spin in a perfect fourth you won’t be able to push me in my next spin, do you see the problem, Enjolras?”

“Well, go to hell, I hope you fall while you jump, because even if I close in a fifth I manage to spin. My ability to make you pirouette is undisputable!”. 

“Yeah, yeah, you’d like that! It’s just that they turn just fine because I’m ready to pirouette for you!”. 

“You bet. Let’s just go through the arabesques again”. 

“The arabesques are just fine, what’s up with them?”.

“I almost fell because you can’t freaking hold my hand in the right way!”.

“Oi, watch out…”. And the banters would just go on and on, while Prouvaire and Courfeyrac watched laughing, stretching and warming up beside their friends who were so obviously falling in love at top speed without even noticing. 

 

The show turned out quite perfect. Louison was really proud of her boys, and they even received a small bouquet with a short note by Fantine. 

_ You were gorgeous tonight, my boys. You don’t just make each other’s head spin but you also warm every watcher’s heart.  _

 

The years passed, Enjolras decided to quit dancing. He was very good, he would have become famous, but he had decided he would study Law and so he had to focus on his High School studies, to be the best he could. 

Grantaire kept dancing, he was admitted to some fancy academy in the big city and even his dad sent him congratulations. 

Before he left the small town where he’d grown up, Grantaire spent every afternoon, after school, in Louison’s dance studio. He would mainly stretch while doing his homework, or try some steps from the evening class, or just go through the choreography of his audition. He hadn’t told Enjolras yet, but when he auditioned for the Academy he had danced to Romeo and Juliet again. 

Sometimes, Enjolras would go to the studio, too. Sometimes he wasn’t alone, he’d bring Courfeyrac, whose damaged tendon had made him stop chasing dreams of professional dancing, or Combeferre, a new friend from school, quite obviously infatuated with Courfeyrac. 

 

They were sixteen, and Grantaire would leave in three weeks. Enjolras had gone to study in the studio, while Grantaire just stretched on the bars and listened to Enjolras revising some Eng Lit essay. 

“You never asked me to show you my exam choreography,” he blurted out suddenly, while Enjolras had stopped rambling about Nathaniel Hawthorne for a second. 

The blonde stared at him for a long second, surprised, taken aback. “I- I never asked. I thought it was private. You mentioned something to Courf about it being about your life- your feelings?”

Grantaire lowered the leg he’d positioned on the bar and went closer to where his friend stood. How to explain? 

“My life… well, yes, it has to do with the past. Quite a lot, also…” he was unable to finish a sentence in the right way, but he kept trying, “about feelings, well, I don’t know what you heard me say, but…”.

Enjolras just kept staring, waiting for him to go on. He didn’t remember the words he’d said to Courf, but he could bet that  _ feelings _ had been a word. 

“But…? But what, ‘Taire?” 

“Why don’t you judge for yourself?”. 

 

And he put on the music, and Enjolras went back to when they were six in the blink of an eye, smiling from ear to ear. 

“Prokofiev? You loser…” was the only thing he said, while he settled with his back on the mirror to enjoy the dancing. 

Grantaire started dancing and it was a whirlwind of emotions, of memories also. It was a choreography of spins and jumps and when the final part arrived Grantaire started pirouetting and only stopped when the music stopped. 

“What’s with you and turning? Always turnin’ and spinnin’ and jumpin’ while turnin’ and spinnin’...” Enjolras looked as breathless as Grantaire felt, but the latter had a better reason to. 

Grantaire just watched him, trying to catch his breath. “It’s because,” he managed, “it is how I feel…”.

Enj tried to put something together and failed, his brow furrowing and then relaxing when he decided he was defeated. Something eluded him, still. 

“How you feel… when?”. 

Grantaire stepped forward a bit, then stared at his feet. “When I’m- When I’m around  _ you _ ”. 

 

Enjolras stopped breathing. He actually stopped. For a long time. 

“Enj? Ange? Please breathe? I didn’t mean to frighten you?”. Enjolras let out a huge amount of air, he hadn’t realized quite how much he had held his breath. 

“You did all this… thinking about me?” his head was spinning, and he was glad he was still sitting down, or probably he would have fainted. 

“I… the same choreographer of that Romeo and Juliet recital helped me… a bit”. 

“You’ve been practicing this for months and you must have thought so long about this… I- I- I. oh God, R. I can’t. I’m thinking so many things right now, my head is so confused… there’s just too much,” and he wanted to explain, but it was impossible. 

“That’s what the pirouettes mean. You make me feel that. And the jumps are what I feel when you say things like what you just said, and I just  _ had _ to use Prokofiev, because-”

“It was the first time you realized what  _ all this  _ meant…” Enjolras whispered, and Grantaire stood silent, “me too, ‘Taire, me too. It… I can’t dance, you know I can’t. But if I could, and if I could choreograph a bit, I would have done… no, I mean, I don’t know, but  _ that _ , what you did, is what I feel too”. 

And he felt very proud for having managed to get to the end of that sentence. So he straightened a bit and attempted to stand up, but Grantaire practically threw himself on him, and so they remained on the floor, laughing. And, of course, kissing. 

  
  


He was leaving in three weeks, though. But they had known, oh, they had known. 

“It was cruel of me, but I had to tell you. You had to know… I couldn’t leave without you knowing,” Grantaire was saying, while they were eating pizza in a nice place near where they lived. 

“It wasn’t cruel, R. I’m… happy. We’ll still manage to see each other. Not every day, but I can be patient-”

“No, you can’t. You’re not patient. So you won’t be fine with it”.

“Why can’t I have a say in how  _ I _ feel? I can and I will be patient even if I will have to wait for months before seeing you again. And I will text you, and call you, and we could Skype, or FaceTime, or…” he stopped, seeing that Grantaire ha lifted a single eyebrow, “ _ what _ ?”.

“You know this won’t last. It’s just not how people  _ stay _ together. What if you meet someone you like more than you like me? What if  _ I _ do?”. 

“I won’t,” Enj replied, forcefully. Because it was true. 

“Oh, please. You’re doing it again”.

“ _ What _ ? What am I doing again?”. 

“Being the stubborn idealist who loses grasp on reality. It’s what you always do. Listen, we can try, but I  _ know _ , I just know, we won’t last”.

Enjolras didn’t reply, not for a while, finished his pizza without saying anything and then said: “You always see the dark side of things, for god’s sake. Why can’t we just try? I’m not asking you to marry me. I’m asking you to text me. And to stay with me when we’re in the same city. And if you want to date someone else, just do it. But I’m not letting go, not now”. 

Grantaire cried, that night, because he believed he didn’t deserve that boy. 

Enjolras wrote, a long list of things that he felt while he was with ‘Taire, his counter-gift to Grantaire’s dance, but he wasn’t going to give it to him soon. 

 

Grantaire left, it was fine, at the beginning. Everything was new, and exciting, and he was studying so much, dancing so much, and the people around him were so interesting. 

But. (of course there was a but). But no one was Enjolras, and everyone kept telling him that he needed to work harder. Harder. More technique. More precision. Less sentiment. 

“You’re talented. Just like every other person here”. 

“You’re good. But try to smile more”. 

“This is fine. But you dance pessimism, dance is inspiration, is dreaming. So dream”. 

It was hard. 

 

So, two months in, he was so sad, and, although he hadn’t exactly been nice to Enjolras recently, he saw no other choice: he phoned him. 

“Hello, what’s up?” offered Enj, sleepy, on the other side of the phone.

“Did I wake you up?”.

“It’s only 2AM, why would I be sleeping?”.

Grantaire smiled: of course he had been sleeping. “I’m sorry, I can hang up”.

“It’s all good. Tell me everything…” and he yawned and moved something around.

“It’s just… I don’t even have the right to stress you at this hour of the night”. 

“Just stop, alright, you have the right, I’m granting you this right… and, you’re still my… my whatever you were two months ago, yeah?”. Grantaire smiled again, clear. The idealist.

“Yeah, I mean, who could escape such a precise description of the job? I’m glad to be your whatever I was, everybody would die to be a whatever they were…”.

Enjolras laughed softly: “Did you want to tell me something?”

“Not exactly, no. I needed you- I mean, to hear you- I mean, I needed to talk to someone who would understand”. 

Enj laughed again: “It’s OK. How’s it going? Still heavy on the legs?”.

“Heavy on the psychological side, mostly. They’re telling me I’m not enough of a dreamer. And that I’m too passionate. Not precise. Not technical. I want to come back home”. 

Enj gasped: “No. No. Nonononono. Don’t come back. I mean, I’d love it if you were here, I could argue with you in person,  _ so much better _ . But, hey. Do you remember when Courf made us watch those  _ Fame _ reruns?”.

“...yeah?”.

“You’re living the dream, man. Out of the four of us, you’re the only one that made it. And you’re like the guys in  _ Fame. _ You’ll be good, I promise. And I’ll come there in less than a week, and then you’ll be here for the holidays, and then… well, I was saving it for when I came, but I can tell you now, I guess”.

“What? Tell me what?”.

“You know, I am going to have to apply for university. Law school. I… want to go there, to Law school. We’d be in the same place, again”. 

Grantaire breathed slowly: “Really?”.

“Really. Really really. I think I’ll get in. So, you will just have to hold on until I get there, R”.

“You think we will last another year?” he asked, because that’s just who he was: he couldn’t dream. 

“Grantaire.” he hardly ever called him by his whole name “We will. And you know why? Because you  _ danced _ for me the truest things I’d ever felt and I’ve tried to… I wrote a thing”.

“Read it,” Grantaire breathed. “I want to listen to you…”.

Enjolras moved stuff around, the noise was weird. 

“Right. I’m here. So. It’s a list. What I feel when I’m around R. Because you danced… you know”.

“I know, go on. I want to hear what you…. God, I’ve been such an asshole to you lately, and you’re awake right now to hear me whining, why do you do it?”.

“ Because...Number 1. When I’m around you, I always laugh, even if I am tired, or not on a good mood. Number 2. When I’m around you, I forget that I was worried about anything. Number 3. When I’m around you, I feel like dancing. But mostly, I watch you dance, and it’s almost better. Almost. Number 4. When I’m around you, I feel fear, of screwing everything up, of losing this. Number 5. When I’m around you, I want to tell you everything that goes through my mind…. Should I go on? There’s three-hundred and seventy more to go”.

Grantaire didn’t know what to say: “Save them for the many nights to come, I beg you, I am going to need this… I am going to need  _ you _ so much”. 

“Okay, we both need to sleep, R, go. I’ll be there in five days. The others are coming too…”

“Good night, see you this Saturday…”. 

 

The next day, Grantaire danced well. He felt so much lighter, and, yes, dreamier. 

 

They lasted a whole year more. They lasted many years more, and they kept fighting, arguing, throwing things at each other when it got that bad. But, in the end, there was love. A lot of love. And there was always their ritual: every once in a while, sometimes more often than other times, Grantaire would call Enjolras in a studio and show him, dancing, what he felt; with time, his steps had grown calmer, less convulsed, the small jumps turned into slow promenades. Enjolras would still write his hundreds of “when I’m around you”s and then he’d give Grantaire whole notebooks of those. 

 

When they were twenty-four, living together in another big city, Grantaire a professional dancer, Enjolras on a prestigious internship, they ended up shopping in a great mall. There was almost no one around and there was music playing. 

“Hey, look at this shoes, do you…. Is that Prokofiev?” 

“It is…”.

Grantaire smiled, took the shoes from Enjolras’ hands and held his hand. “Do you permit it?”.

Enjolras smiled and stepped into the choreography as if he’d only practiced it the day before. 

And they spun, and spun, and spun, and at the end of the music they laughed for a long while. 

The shop clerk never protested, although that couldn’t have been very legal. 

“I wonder what happened to that old man…”.

“Our choreographer, you mean?”.

“Yeah, I mean, we should probably thank him”.

“Like, invite him to the wedding…”.

Grantaire almost choked on his breath. “ _ What _ ?”.

“What  _ what _ ? Are you still doubting if we’re going to last?”.

  
For the honor of the chronicle, yes, he was still doubting that, and he was always going to doubt that. But there lied the balance of their relationship: Grantaire doubted, Enjolras hoped, just like in a lift in ballet one can’t lift the other if the other doesn’t jump a bit. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much to the nice person who posted the prompt and allowed me to use it!  
> I had a lot of fun, sorry if this doesn't make much sense. I just love the two things that were put together here.  
> As usual, if you notice mistakes, typos, grammar mistakes, let me know, please! :)


End file.
